1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus.
2. Related Art
A representative example of a liquid ejecting apparatus is an ink jet recording apparatus. Ink jet recording apparatuses include serial-head ones and line-head ones. The former produces prints by moving ink jet recording heads mounted on a carriage, while the latter does so by ejecting ink through nozzles arranged over the same width as the entire width of the recording medium used. A typical ink jet recording head incorporates actuators, each of which is composed of a pressure chamber and a piezoelectric element. The pressure chamber communicates with a nozzle opening for discharging ink droplets and has a diaphragm. The piezoelectric element vibrates in a flexural mode to deform the diaphragm and compress the ink in the pressure chamber, whereby ink droplets are discharged through the nozzle opening.
White inks containing particulate titanium oxide, which is a white pigment, have been used with ink jet recording heads of this type (e.g., see JP-A-2008-208330).
Pigment particles used in white inks of that kind are often as large as 200 nm or more in average diameter because such large particles can effectively mask the resulting prints, thereby giving the prints the desired characteristics.
However, white inks containing such large particles are likely to produce a mist. As mentioned above, white inks are highly opaque. A liquid ejecting apparatus has an encoder for positioning its carriage, and once a mist generated from a white ink adheres to the scan window of this encoder, the encoder cannot locate the exact position of the carriage and thus cannot position the carriage.